As consumers adopt ad blocking to protect themselves from intrusive and unwelcome ads, what role should mobile operators be playing?

It doesn’t take much to spoil the user experience when viewing media on a smartphone. But network connections are only one factor in quality of service for content delivery; a far more widespread problem is the way web pages are delivered. In particular, it’s the third party serving of display advertising, especially video, that appears to be causing the biggest issues.

These ads are far more intrusive on smartphones than they are on larger desktop pages. They are also far more of a burden on page loading times, and certain ads — especially video-based ones that are set to auto-play — can quickly race through a user’s cellular data plan allowance, often without them being aware of the fact. All of which leads to an unsatisfactory user experience, for which mobile operators tend to unfairly receive the blame.

Hence the rather controversial arrival of ad blocking software for mobile devices. The New York Times reported that almost 200 million people now use ad blockers worldwide. Such software is not new, and has been around for years in the desktop environment. A report published by PageFair and Adobe claimed that ad blocking is expected to cost publishers more than $21.8 billion in 2015 in lost revenue — 14 per cent of global ad spend. By the end of 2016, it predicts the global cost of ad blocking to almost double to $41.4 billion.

NOTE: This article is the first in a series of four articles specially commissioned for TMN Quarterly by inaugural guest editor Mary Clark, CMO of Syniverse. In a post on Syniverse’s site, Clark talks about her aims and goals as guest editor, and explains her aims in choosing the issues she did.